


These Streets We've Named Will Never Be The Same

by waltzmatildah



Category: Rookie Blue
Genre: Angst, Car Accidents, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:21:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i> And so it’s just the two of them, the two of them and the giant Andy McNally shaped elephant occupying the backseat, when the sound of erupting metal splits the early dawn into shattered slivers of black and bright, bright white.</i> Set post the season three finale.<br/>---<br/>WARNING: graphic depictions of an MVA and associated injuries, including TBI.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Streets We've Named Will Never Be The Same

_Fractured lines in the pavement, embers colour the air…_

 

\- - -

 

Sam’s not sure, later, how it came to be that he was the one volunteering to give Luke Callaghan a ride back to the station. Or, for that matter, why the detective decided to accept the half-hearted offer. His best guess: there were no other options.

And so it’s just the two of them, the two of them _and_ the giant Andy McNally shaped elephant occupying the backseat, when the sound of erupting metal splits the early dawn into shattered slivers of black and bright, bright white.

The squad car flips before he has time to register what’s happened. He knows this because the view through the disappearing windshield morphs from limp airbag to rain-damp blacktop to heavy cloud to tree branches and back again, and back again, and back again, and, as they leave the road for the final time, he knows they’re heading down an incline only because he knows the geography of the area so well.

 

 

 

When the sliding and the rolling and the blood numbing shriek of metal against metal against earth and tree and guardrail comes to an abrupt end, the first thing that Sam registers is the silence; absolute in the wake of the unimaginable cacophony that had preceded it. 

There is silence. 

And then there is nothing.

 

 

 

He comes to slowly. 

Slow blinks.

Slow breaths.

Slow synapses in his skull that fail to compute the answers to the slow questions he’s slowly asking himself.

 

 

 

The next time is less forgiving; sledgehammers, plural, against his ribcage. 

A tentative look tells Sam that the steering column is practically in his lap, hidden as it is behind the now useless airbag.

And, for the time being anyway, he’s not thinking about all the things that he can’t see.

 

 

 

He remembers then, one thing; “Callaghan?”

His answer: yet more of the bubbling silence that’s threatening to drown him.

“Luke, can you hear me?”

Sam’s own voice sounds like it’s coming at them from a great distance. As though it’s bouncing through the tree tops before registering inside the car, and he twists in his seat then, as much as he can. As much as he can without passing out. It’s not very far but it’s far enough. Luke’s sitting back in the passenger seat, head against the rest, eyes closed, mouth open slightly. Like maybe he’s just fallen asleep. It’s kind of peaceful even and, for a beat, for a sledgehammer strike inside his chest cavity, he envies him that peace.

But there’s a mixture of what Sam guesses is blood and cerebrospinal fluid leaking sluggishly from the one ear that he can see. The collar of his shirt is soaked through, an oddly formed patch of pale pink, and Sam’s conscious enough now to know that bleeding out of your ears is pretty much always a Very Bad Sign.

“Callaghan, shit. Talk to me...”

He doesn’t even know if he manages to say the words out loud.

 

 

 

Sam’s eyes drop to where the detective’s hand has fallen, palm up, fingers curled, into the console between the two front seats, and he thinks the distance between it and his own hand may actually be surmountable. 

Just.

He gets his fingers around the exposed skin of Luke’s wrist and closes his eyes against the building panic. It’s not the first time Sam’s had to do this, search for a pulse. Not even the first time he’s had to do it for this exact person.

And he hopes Luke has no plans to make it a habit, the whole ‘is he dead or isn’t he’ thing, because, _fuck_.

 

 

 

But, and like last time, there’s something there. Sam can’t quite fathom whether it’s too fast or too slow or too something else entirely, but there’s something and, for now, it’s better than nothing.

When it comes to heartbeats Sam thinks something is _always_ better than nothing.

 

 

 

The hand beneath his fingertips moves suddenly. Not much more than a twitch.

“Callaghan?”

He twists in his seat again, gets a little further round this time he thinks, before the edges of his vision start to grey out, blurry.

“Hey, how you doin’ over there?”

Luke’s eyes are open to half-mast and his mouth his moving slowly. Open. Closed. Open again. There’s no sound. The effect is chilling.

His eyelids flutter mechanically then, and the hand beneath Sam’s trembles and jitters in a way that Sam knows, he _knows_ , can mean only one thing, but he’s refusing to say the word to himself right now because there’s next to absolutely nothing he can do about it.

Or about the blood still leaking from his ear.

Or about the way the air he’s breathing in suddenly sounds thick. And wet. And-

 

 

 

And then the trembling stops again.

 

 

 

The window beside Luke’s head is shattered but still in place for the most part. The webbed cracks are blood smeared and Sam doesn’t want to think too much about the impact forces required to do that; to create that kind of damage with a human skull.

The radio’s dead. If he could reach it, which he doubts, he’d get nothing but emptiness.

“Swarek..”

The breathy echo legit. scares the crap out of him.

“Callaghan,” he manages in response; successfully hides the fleeting spike of jubilation that does a confused one eighty through his messed up insides.

“Sammy…”

“Yep.”

“Sam.” The single syllable cracks around a half sob.

And the jubilation fizzes. Up-turned soda across the kitchen floor.

 

 

 

“What’s the damage, Callaghan?” Sam is not expecting a response.

He is not expecting a _lucid_ response.

“’s Andy?”

And there it is; because Andy’s been undercover for four months, and Luke’s the one that sent her there.

“Nope, just us, buddy.”

A lie. They’ve never been buddies.

 

 

 

“D’you turn off the heat?” 

Luke’s voice rumbles low and rough through the space between them. The sound of it at odds with the naive confusion he’s still lost in.

“No.”

“Are we dead?”

Sam huffs out a half laugh that he regrets instantly; finishes with a groan instead, pushes the noise out through desperately clenched teeth, “God, I hope not. Can you imagine if the two of us had to spend eternity toge-”

“Sam...” His own name, insistent and hitched around a muted inhale that Sam can hear him cut off suddenly. Panic blossoming as Luke brings his right hand up to his forehead, swipes it clumsily across his brow before removing it again, peering at the skin on his fingers as though searching for signs of blood and chaos. Most of him is covered in the stuff, how he’s managed to inspect the one part of his body that isn’t is beyond Sam, even if he is eternally grateful for it at the same time.

“Hey, hey, Callaghan? Listen to me-” A pause because, what can he say? Really? “Just chillax, alright?”

_Chillax._

Seriously?

The part of Sam’s brain that is beginning to think hysteria might be a fun alternative ride to this one can’t help but twist at the notion of telling a guy with brain matter leaking out his ear to fucking _chillax_.

“Just, it’s okay. Help’s coming.” Another lie as far as he knows. They seem to roll of his tongue so readily these days, “It’s okay.”

 

 

 

As Luke’s eyes slide to closed again, Sam dares a more thorough catalogue of the damage; his own first because it’s infinitely easier to deal with.

His ribs are shot. That much was clear from the very beginning. And he’s pretty sure his left shoulder connected solidly with the door at some point and is no longer operating as a shoulder really should.

He can’t see his legs; they’re pinned beneath the dash.

He can feel them because, _jesus_ , but he can’t see them and he thinks that’s probably for the best right now.

 

 

 

The rhythmic shaking from before starts up again, insistent; catches Sam off guard this time as he quickly adds a chorus of his own to the staccato sound of Luke’s knuckles against the cracked plastic console.

_Oh, no, no, nonono. No more. Not again. Not that._

_Anything but that…_

Sam moves his hand finally, drags it from Luke’s wrist and uses it to prop up his chin and maintain his airway as bloodied ropes of saliva spill between his clenched teeth. Sam counts this one out carefully, denies it’s so he can measure the duration against any subsequent seizures; firm as he is in the belief that there will _be_ no more seizures.

“Okay, Callaghan? We got an understanding about this, right?”

“Sam?” Luke breathes out around the ghost of a sound; barely there. And his eyes are open again, gaze fixed straight ahead through the emptied out space where the windshield once was. Pebbled safety glass, irregular shaped marbles, is strewn through the interior of the vehicle. Sam imagines a trail of the stuff leading all the way back to the road. 

Cookie crumbs on the carpet.

“Yeah?”

“Where are we?”

“Where d’you think we are, buddy?” _Buddy_. Again. Like it’s now a reflex he can’t quite shake.

“Home?” Pitiful. “Are we going home?”

Sam wants to punch something. Instead settles for dropping his fingers back to Luke’s wrist; for seeking out the soft thud of his pulse; for breathing. 

“My head hurts.”

Well, _no shit…_

 

 

 

“McNally will never forgive me if I kill you, Callaghan,” he says quickly, loud and firm. “No matter what you might think. And I really, really need her to forgive me, okay?”

There’re inexplicable tears stinging behind Sam’s eyelids suddenly, and he wants nothing more than to rub at them fiercely, blur them into extinction, but the one hand he’s got that’s still operational is pressed to the faded pulse point on Luke’s left wrist and he knows without needing to think about it that he won’t be taking it away any time soon.

“Callaghan?” He gives the slack arm a sharp squeeze.

Waits for the response he’s not expecting to get.

He screams then; inside his head. Frustration and fear and a bone-deep sense of foreboding.

 

 

 

He rambles after that because, in the absence of birds and breezes and muted sounds from the street above, Sam tells himself anything is better than the silence; thick and viscous. He tells stories from the academy. From Fifteen. From high school. 

From nowhere. 

Stories about Jerry and how he, Sam, was going to be a best man despite all his doubts that the moniker applies to him in the slightest. He confesses in a breathless rush that he told Andy he loved her while she was waist-deep in grenade related terror.

Then he tells the story again just because he can. 

 

 

 

“You holdin’ my hand, Swarek?”

Sam halts his monologue mid-sentence, gives himself a half beat to wonder how much Luke had probably heard of his _I love you_ saga before calculating that the likelihood of him actually _remembering_ any of it is less than slim.

“Fulfilling a lifelong dream, Callaghan. You have no idea...”

Luke’s got his head turned a little in his direction now, and Sam can’t decide if the movement is a good thing because, hey, consciousness, or a bad thing because god knows what kind of spinal injuries could be hidden in the relative peace that has descended.

In the end, he decides to hedge his bets.

“Can you move your fingers?”

Luke blinks a few times, scrunches up his brow for a second or several in a way that should be comical but absolutely isn’t, all things considered, before his fingers curl in and out. In and out. In and out.

Sam exhales slowly. Carefully. A breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

“Good. Okay, that’s good.”

 

 

 

Minutes must pass then. A bloom of bright sunshine has grown from nowhere across Luke’s chest, an eerie inverse of the pink-red blood that’s still leaking slowly from his ear. He’s unconscious again, and Sam half suspects he’d been right there with him in dreamland for a little while.

 

 

 

And a little while more.

 

 

 

He wakes this time to Luke’s harsh breathing and the sound of halted movements dissolved in muted agony. Half expects to open his eyes and find him seizing again. 

Instead, Luke’s eyes are open wide. Wired. Fierce and feral and determined as the hand that had been secured in Sam’s grip now snakes its way unsteadily beneath the flap of his jacket.

“Callaghan?”

His own voice is back to the rough rumble he remembers from the start of this ordeal and he wonders how long he’s been out for this time. And what it all could mean.

Answer: Nothing good.

“Phone was ringing.”

Besides the arm that he’s attempting to co-ordinate into a deliberate movement, Luke appears rigid with pain. 

“Luke, hey, take a breath and then talk to me. What’s going on?”

The patch of sunshine on Luke’s chest has been decorated with more of the bloodied saliva from before and Sam’s suddenly horrified by the notion that he’s probably seized again, unnoticed.

_Fuck._

 

 

 

“I- What, Sam? What happened? Because I- My head, god. I think-”

Sam’s not sure he wants to know what it is that Luke thinks at the moment.

“Did we crash?”

“Yeah, yeah we did.”

“Well,” and some of the tension falls away, “fuck.”

_Exactly._

 

 

 

“Hey, Sam, you with me bud?”

It’s Oliver suddenly, loud and crystal clear, and Sam has no idea where he’s materialised from but he thinks he could cry nonetheless. Thinks maybe he is _already_ crying.

“Callaghan-” He coughs around the name and something inside his chest shifts sharply against something else and he’s not sure where Oliver goes for a while, but it sure seems out of reach.

“Hey, shh, it’s all good. Officer Peck’s right there, Sammy boy. And we’ve got EMS on the way, and I’m thinking, maybe we might add a request for Rescue to that call, just in case, hey?”

He can hear Gail on her radio then, all practiced and efficient and, well, _Peck_ , and he thinks it’s a bonus that it’s Gail because they’ll listen to her. A Peck. The Pecks are always listened to ‘round these parts.

And he thinks Rescue might be a good idea as well.

 

 

 

“What the hell happened, Sammy?”

And isn’t that just the million dollar questions because, yeah, _what the hell happened?_

He’s gathering strands together for something he hopes might be an answer when Oliver continues; “It’s lucky for you guys Officer Peck over there had her ‘damsel in distress’ radar set to high frequency tonight, isn’t it?”

 

 

 

_“Hey, Homicide? You with me?”_

Peck’s words, surprisingly gentle, affectionate, fill the ruined interior of the squad car, and Sam wonders, absently, how he’s managed to miss that. To miss the moment where Peck and Callaghan developed nicknames for each other.

Where they became the sort of people who even _had_ nicknames to begin with.

_“Luke, the time for beauty sleep is so over, you need to open your eyes for me.”_

_“Squeeze my hand.”_

_“Do you know where you are?”_

_“Do you know who I am?”_

A litany of questions and of requests that remains unanswered.

She’s scared. He can hear the icy fear laced through her words as she drags Luke’s resolutely closed eyelids up with the pad of one thumb like she knows exactly what it is she’s looking for. And hey, maybe she does. Maybe she knows what blown pupils look like, and how to tell if someone’s brains have turned to mush inside their skull.

Maybe that why’s she’s scared? Maybe she’s scared because she knows and, and, and... And now that his own brain cells are mostly back on line, he can’t seem to shut them the hell up.

 

 

 

Oliver’s doing something with his seatbelt and pressing gauze to back of his head and a thousand other things that Sam can’t seem to keep track of. And Gail is still scared.

_“Fuck, Callaghan, open your damn eyes!”_

_“Peck, relax. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”_

But Sam doesn’t think that it is. And he completely understands her need to shout at Luke. And get angry at him. And swear at him. He thinks he’s done his fair share of all of it recently.

 

 

 

_Wake the fuck up, Callaghan…_

_Don’t fucking speak to me like you’re already a dead-man, Callaghan…_

_Stop breathing like that, Callaghan. Like every exhale might just be your fucking last…_

 

 

 

_“Gail.”_

Finally. Something other than clogged air dragged, muddy, through broken lungs.

_“Yep. The one and only.”_

Sam’s watching her closely, the soft smile as she shifts the sweater she’s got pressed up against Luke’s head; the way that it slips into momentary horror as she repositions the material quickly. He catches a fleeting glimpse of the soaked fabric as she does so, and the pointed look she shoots across the front seats to Oliver. 

But at least Callaghan’s mostly awake now, pointed looks and blood soaked sweaters be damned.

_“What happened?”_

_“Not really your main concern right now, Luke.”_

_“Mmmm…”_

_“Hey, nope, eyes open. No more sleeping. Officer Swarek here tells me you’ve done more than enough of that.”_

Sam thinks: ‘Officer Swarek’ remembers saying no such thing and he feels his brow crease into a confused frown as he struggles to think back through the past minutes and seconds. 

“Didn’t you, Officer Swarek.” Pointed, as though she’s telling and not asking. He catches on then.

“Oh, yeah… I did. I did tell her that. Out like a light, you were…” And perhaps he does take it a step too far.

“Sam?” All breathy and confused-like. As though maybe he’d forgotten in the time that had elapsed between now and before.

Sam swallows thickly around the sound.

“Where’s EMS?” he manages to ask. Gets a lock on Oliver.

“They’re on their way, okay?”

The sudden spike in fear? In complete and utter _dread_ of what’s still to come? He thinks he blames that on Oliver. And on Peck a little bit, too. On the fact that they’ve shown up now, and taken some semblance of control. And all that’s really left for him to do now is fall apart.

On cue.

 

 

 

_“What happened?”_

Again, in that same confused breathlessness. As though Sam hasn’t already told him a thousand times over.

And he wants to scream at Gail to shut him up.

“What hap-?”

“We’re thinking of ordering pizza,” she counters then, apropos of nothing. “Any requests?”

Luke laughs, an impossibly delicate sound, and bright red bubbles of blood form between his teeth. Spill over his lips and stain his chin.

Sam thinks he’s going to be sick.

_“Pizza. Yeah.”_

 

 

 

Sirens bleed into existence then, far away but getting closer. And Oliver’s grip on his bicep tightens in response.

“Hear that, boys and girls? Just a few more minutes, okay?” 

And while his words would suggest he was speaking to everyone, Sam knows intrinsically that the hidden message there was all for him. Some hybrid combination of _relax_ and _I’ve got this_ and _it’s all going to be fine_. 

Well practiced parent-speak.

And he’s inexplicably grateful for it.

 

 

 

Gail’s still occupied with keeping Luke alive. Sam can only just make out the decidedly one-sided conversation taking place to his right. Soft and calm and careful. Just words, little else. One hand, fingers splayed across his stomach. Contact. The other, still holding the blood-stained sweater to his head.

He almost wants to ask her what she can see. What damage she can see. And he starts and stops the request for information in his head countless times before deciding that he already knows it’s not good, and anything more definitive than that right now is probably unnecessary knowledge. 

But then, suddenly; “He keeps fitting.” And Gail’s steady stream of conversation slams to a stop.

“What?”

“Three times that I’m sure about,” he nods, desperate all of a sudden for them to know. For someone _else_ to know. 

Speaking is becoming increasingly difficult. He thinks the Andy McNally shaped elephant that had been on the backseat might just be sitting on his chest now and breathing air in and around the pressure isn’t really working like was before.

“Sam?”

But the endless black and the forever silence is back then. 

A slippery slope he can no longer resist.

 

 

 

Next: 

Flashes.

Oliver’s voice. Others that he can’t quite recognise. Words being shouted. Bouncing off his skin. The Andy McNally shaped elephant on his chest isn’t quite so heavy anymore, which is nice.

But he misses her too; fiercely. A paradox, he thinks.

Luke’s shirt has been cut open, his head swathed in gauze and bandage and tape, a neck brace, one to match his own he suspects, has been secured in place and most of his face covered with an oxygen mask; one that needs to be pumped by hand. An ambo he knows pretty well is standing over him, catches Sam’s eye briefly, looks grim around the tight smile she manages to offer up.

“Hey, Swarek,” she calls, her colleague crouching down and around her, doing something to Luke that Sam can’t quite track, “You know you two only had to call me, right? This kind of attention seeking really is totally unnecessary...” 

 

 

 

And then:

The shearing of metal against metal. Again. 

_No. Not again..._

He braces himself for the fall that never comes.

The dash disappears from his lap instead, replaced by empty air and screaming. 

 

 

 

Later:

He’s flat on his back and moving. The sky overhead bleeds in and out of focus at intervals too fleeting to keep up with. He lets it happen. Floats on an opiate wave of whatever it is they’ve pumped into him.

There’s a hand clamped around his bicep again. Still? Oliver’s. He’s not sure where the rest of him is, but figures it can’t be far.

Everything around him is sound; a great thumping bass that vibrates through the air, through his skin, through his hollowed out bones.

 

 

 

“Hey, Sammy...”

And Oliver’s face comes into view. Wide grin.

Too wide maybe as the strobing emergency lights bounce off his skin.

“Diaz here-” Oliver gestures vaguely in a direction that Sam can’t follow. Also, Diaz now? He thinks, fleetingly, that this whole thing is turning into quite the circus. “He’s going to drive my car back to the station so I can hitch a ride with you. That sound okay?”

Sam brings his uninjured hand up in the direction of the mask pressed to his face, meets an immovable obstacle mid-air.

“Nope, leave that where it is.”

“Where’s Peck?”

His voice echoes in his head, his breath hot in the confined, plastic space.

“With Callaghan still. They sent a chopper for him and she’s-”

He blinks as Oliver keeps talking, lips moving around words that no longer register.

“Chopper?”

Oliver stops, drops his hand to Sam’s shoulder, “Yeah, I know, it’s… not good.”

Sam fights to get the mask off again, certain in that moment that he’s going to suffocate beneath it. But Oliver’s fingers lock in his again, tight, his other hand righting the device back into place.

“Promise me you’ll stop doing that, or I won’t-”

But Oliver’s cut off as a paramedic, one Sam doesn’t know, starts the stretcher in a controlled one eighty so he can be moved head-first into the bus. “Time to go, boys.”

 

 

 

Sam lets his eyelids slide to closed, bounce back open again. Slow and measured. Up and down. Using the in between to catalogue what he can remember of before. Before an airbag exploded in his face. Before the entire world split open and before Luke’s brain started leaking out of his ears.

Before all of that.

There’d been muted conversation. Case discussion. Little else.

He’d kept his answers deliberately clipped, suspected Callaghan was only asking him questions, all polite and professional, because he knew how much it’d piss Sam off.

He’s dragged from the fog of pain meds and blood loss and shock and terror and a thousand other adjectives and explanations that he can’t bring himself to name by the obnoxious beeping of a cell phone.

Oliver’s voice rolls over him in waves and he struggles to maintain the concentration required to accurately track the conversation that follows. He deduces the identity of the caller from the way Oliver keeps saying her name, _Calm down, Gail. Gail, calm down. Seriously, Peck, you need to breathe…_

Whatever happens next is desperately one-sided as Oliver goes quiet and Sam twists his head back far enough that he can see his face, can see the nodding and the shaking and the way he presses the back of his hand against his mouth, like he’s swallowing a scream and then he _is_ screaming. And screaming and screaming and screaming…

And maybe that’s not Oliver at all.

Maybe that’s just him. 

 

 

 

There are voices behind the curtain. And Sam could not for a minute tell you how he got to where he is right now, not if his life depended on it, which, yeah… But he knows he’s at St. Michael’s and that he’s about to be the lucky recipient of a chest tube or something equally horrific sounding and that, apparently, his mother, _his mother_ , is on her way.

For now though, there are voices behind the curtain. He’s not sure if they think it’s soundproof, or if they think he’s unconscious, or if they’re not thinking about him at all.

Because Gail’s telling Oliver about how Luke died in the helicopter. How he died three times. And then once more as they were wheeling him towards the doors from the helipad and apparently they had to stop right there on the roof and bring him back to life. Again.

And again and again and again.

It’s a fascinating tale. And Sam thinks the clear liquid they’ve got dripping a steady stream into his arm is the only reason he can eavesdrop on their whispered panic with a detached kind of calm.

The curtain is far from soundproof, but he thinks it might as well be.

Closes his eyes and floats. 

 

 

 

The initial shock of being unconscious is beginning to fade, and the more times Sam lives through the experience the less violent the waking up becomes. 

They tell him, later, that he woke up once in recovery, thrashed himself around so severely that they ended up having to sedate him. He decides then that that instance doesn’t count because he can’t remember it.

And he gets to make the rules.

 

 

 

The first time it’s not Oliver or his mother or Frank in his room when he wakes up, it’s Peck. She’s curled in a chair beside his bed, her knees up under her chin and her eyes closed. She’s rocking back and forth, almost up onto her toes before switching direction and pressing back into the seat.

Toes and back. Toes and back. Rhythmic. 

Mascara streaks, inky black, have carved her face into pieces that he can’t begin to comprehend.

“How’s Luke?” And the words have rolled off his tongue, loose and slippery, before he’s examined whether he’s ready for the truth.

A thousand shadows cross her face. One after the other and then two and three at time. “Alive.”

Sam is nowhere near naïve enough to think that her response forms an actual answer to his question.

He nods and clings to the notion nonetheless.

The incessant beeping of the monitors he’s still attached to mix with all the things she’s not saying and fill the room to full, to overflowing with a degree of energy that Sam is sure will shatter the windows.

One false move…

 

 

 

“Andy’s coming,” Gail says, and all the air in his lungs seems to solidify.

“Andy? But-”

“Come on, Sam.” And her mouth twists, momentarily ugly. “Give her more credit than that.” 

He wants to be indignantly confused by her accusation, but he’s not. Not even a little bit. He nods back his concession and lets his eyes close around the new information. 

_Andy._

_Andy’s coming…_

Sam’s relief is palpable and he exhales around it as her eyes darken in response. Gail’s hard again he notices suddenly, there’s an edge to her that had been slowing disappearing, walls crumbled and veneer faded to a point where she was actually visible for a while there.

It’s gone again though. He can see that now. The softness with which she was able to speak to Luke as she held him, as she pressed a sweater to his leaking insides and made jokes with him while his own blood bubbled between his teeth.

She’s back to rigid now, and fierce, and he wonders at what point the shift occurred. Was it the third time he died in her arms, or the fourth?

“Gail?”

Her eyebrows rise, lips pressing into a thin line, and he can’t help but think of the move as a dare of sorts.

“Are you okay?”

Sam can see it’s not the question she’d been expecting as she almost reels back into the chair, arms crossed over her chest defensively, like she’s been caught out and can’t backpedal fast enough.

“Don’t-”

A warning. But Sam’s not sure what for. 

“He’s tougher than he looks, you know? Callaghan-”

She makes a sound, like she’s choking, being strangled by hands neither of them can see. He feels inexplicably sick as her fingers disappear into her mouth, a physical attempt to push back the horror that must play every time she closes her eyes.

Sam knows what she sees.

He sees it too.

He wants to go back to the start of this conversation and erase it all, but he can’t. And he won’t. Luke deserves more than that.

“He knows what it takes,” Sam says, blinking fiercely, “To beat the odds, he knows what it takes.”

Gail’s seams are coming apart now, and she’s folding into herself in the chair, as though climbing inside her own bones is the only escape route she has left.

“He knows what it takes, Gail, because he’s been doing it his whole life.”


End file.
